Great Synagogue of Senta

The Jewish community

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jews came to Senta in the eighteenth century, mostly from Hungary and Moravia. They traded above all in grain and textiles, and many were artisans. A burial society, the chevra kaddisha, was founded in 1858. The town's first rabbi is named as Isaac Heilborn, followed by Solomon Klein and Moses Leibowitz; Eliezer Rausnitz headed a yeshiva, and Hermann-Zvi Schweiger was known as a Hebraist. Census figures collected by Attila Pejin give 1,082 Jews in 1880 (5.1 per cent of the population), 1,328 in 1910 and 1,432 in 1941 (4.5 per cent each time). After the schism of 1868-69 the Jews of Senta formed three separate communities, Neolog, Orthodox and status quo, a division the Judaica calls unusual for the region. The Orthodox congregation later called itself 'Sephardi', although it had no Sephardi members, and bought its own section of the Jewish cemetery. The Neolog community, which built and used the great synagogue, was led at various times by Armin Graf, Nathan Kramick and Solomon Ehrenfeld, while Armin Fischer led the local Zionists. The mathematician Michael Fekete, later a professor at the Hebrew University, was born in the town.

Architecture and design

No description, plan or photograph of the great synagogue of Senta was found in the sources that could be read for this entry, so its architect, builder, style, size and seating capacity are all unknown. What can be said is limited. It was a purpose-built synagogue of the early 1870s, raised for the Neolog congregation within a few years of the 1868-69 schism, and the town's tourist office describes it as the larger of Senta's two synagogues, in contrast to the small synagogue of 1928-29. A survey of Vojvodina's synagogues published by the Archives of Vojvodina in 2021, drawing on Pavle Šosberger's 1998 book, lists a Senta synagogue with the dates 1806 and 1950; this may refer to an earlier building on the same or another site, or reflect different information about this one, and the survey does not explain it. Postcards of Zenta's main square, market and churches survive in Hungarian museum collections, but none examined in this research was captioned as the synagogue. Goran Levi's 2016 catalogue of Serbian synagogues and Šosberger's book may hold a photograph and description; neither could be consulted.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in the great synagogue itself. It served the Neolog congregation, the progressive wing of Hungarian Jewry, from the 1870s until 1944, while the Orthodox and status quo congregations worshipped separately; from 1929 the Orthodox had their own small synagogue in the town. The Neolog congregation's lay leaders named in the Encyclopaedia Judaica are Armin Graf, Nathan Kramick and Solomon Ehrenfeld, and the same work names Isaac Heilborn, Solomon Klein and Moses Leibowitz among the rabbis of Senta, though without dates or saying which congregation each served. The town also had a yeshiva under Rabbi Eliezer Rausnitz and an active Zionist movement led by Armin Fischer. The records of the congregation have not survived: Attila Pejin notes that the Holocaust destroyed nearly all the documents of Senta's Jewish communities, so that gravestones are often the only remaining record of individual members. The names of the Neolog congregation's rabbis and cantors in the twentieth century are unknown.

Destruction

No source found reports damage to the great synagogue during the Second World War. After its congregation was deported in 1944 the building stood empty, and the Neolog community was never re-established. According to Jewish Heritage Europe, the town acquired the building and demolished it in 1957; the Senta tourist office and the Hungarian Conservative also give 1957 as the year of demolition. In 1957 the town was governed by the Communist authorities of socialist Yugoslavia, so it was the Communist town administration that had it pulled down. No source read explains why the building was demolished or what was done with its materials and fittings. The same decade saw the small Orthodox synagogue taken over by the municipality in 1956 and turned into the 'Partizan' sports centre, which shows how the town dealt with former Jewish property. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states simply that the great synagogue was demolished, without a date. The English Wikipedia list records it only as demolished after 1945.

The community’s fate

Senta had 1,432 Jewish inhabitants at the 1941 census, and the town's tourist office puts the Jewish population in the years up to 1944 at about 1,500 to 2,000. In 1944 the community was deported to Auschwitz. Sources disagree on how many came back: the Encyclopaedia Judaica states that all the Jews of Senta perished, while the town's tourist office says that only a few hundred returned after the deportations. Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, rabbi of the Orthodox congregation from 1939, survived the camps, went to the United States and in 1980 became the Satmar Rebbe; he died in 2006 at the age of 91. The survivors did not re-establish the three prewar congregations. The small Orthodox synagogue served the remaining Jews until the 1950s, before passing to the municipality in 1956. By 2023 a local representative of the community told Jewish Heritage Europe that only one or two families remained from a community that had numbered nearly two thousand before the war. The number of deportees from Senta and the number killed are unknown.

The site today

The great synagogue's site is today marked by a memorial, which according to Jewish Heritage Europe has stood there since 2001. The exact street address of the synagogue and of the memorial was not found in the sources consulted, so the map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Senta rather than the documented site. Nothing of the building is known to survive. The town's other synagogue, the small synagogue of 1928-29, survived as a sports hall and was restored with Hungarian government and municipal funding; it reopened as a cultural venue in May 2023. The Jewish cemetery of Senta also survives and its gravestones have been surveyed by local researchers.

Notable names